Oak Point Agronomics

When I retired from Miner Institute in 2008 after working for over 40 years of working with farmers I knew two things: First, I wanted to retire and spend spring through fall at the St. Lawrence River where my family and their forebears have lived for over 150 years. And second, I wanted to remain active in agriculture in general and also in agricultural consulting. Initially I had some concern about my ability to remain relevant since at Miner Institute I lived almost every day with the consequences of my crop recommendations (often to my chagrin). Without having a connection “to the land”, so to speak, could I continue to effectively advise farmers about crop management, crop varieties, etc.?

Fortunately this hasn’t been a problem, and I still get out on a number of dairy farms each year, both here in the Northeast as well as in other parts of the country. I also get phone calls and emails from farmers, seldom with easy questions, and this keeps me aware of hot-button issues as well as the current crop situation. I’ve spent considerable time reviewing farmers’ soil analyses in the past month, trying to help them save some money on fertilizer expense. It’s not surprising, but still discouraging, that regardless of how high soil test P and K are, some dealers apparently couldn’t sleep without recommending P and K in the starter fertilizer. Others are in love with (often expensive) micronutrients, recommending them in spite of high soil test levels. Manure is a multivitamin for crops, and dairy farmers who do a responsible job of manure application seldom encounter serious micronutrient problems.

Staying relevant for the often desk-bound is almost certainly easier in the “Information Age”; I get about a dozen on-line crop-oriented newsletters and don’t hesitate to learn from the experiences of others. For much of my full-time career, first as a regional agronomist for Cornell University Cooperative Extension and then at Miner Institute, I realized that much of the good I was able to do was from watching what top operators did to achieve high yields and/or high quality, and then transmitting this information to others. Thanks to continuing contacts from farmers and agribusiness, an active part-time consulting business, and some “creative plagiarism”, I’m still able to do this.

I’ve been a global warming skeptic, at least by not ascribing climate changes entirely to man-made causes, but it’s increasingly obvious that something is happening to our weather. For over 300 months now, each and every month the average global temperature has been above the long-term mean. It’s a frosty morning in the Thousand Islands, and while anything relating to warming seems desirable, it wasn’t but two weeks ago that it was 80 F here–in March, no less! I still think that something more than just greenhouse gases are responsible, that this is combining with other more natural factors.

One thing that a record-warm March has done is open up the opportunity for farmers to make mistakes in their cropping decisions that they’ve never made before. Thank goodness that we’ve had a return to more seasonable weather or some farmers in the Northeast may have been planting corn this week. I never thought I’d see corn planted in Northern NY in mid-April and still don’t think it’s a wise move, but a few farmers have done it. What may be worse in the long run–the corn has done just fine, because it will just encourage them to plant more. These farmers probably haven’t had to walk acre after acre of badly frosted corn, as I have. Frost didn’t kill it–at least not most of it–but the frost sure did set it back. Pennsylvania experiences just last year point out the risks involved: They planted some corn weeks earlier than normal, and it turned out to be some of the worst corn they had. Cornell agronomists are stating that the weather has changed enough so that North Country farmers can now plant Group I maturity soybeans instead of primarily Group 0. Perhaps, but I’d like to see a few more years of data before making this leap of faith. They’re probably right, but…

“Travels” is a book by Michael Crichton, and “Travels with Charley” one by John Steinbeck, but neither of these gentlemen are around any longer to complain about my stealing the title. During much of my career I’ve been a lucky guy, getting to see much of the world and most of the contiguous United States, mostly on someone else’s dime. In case you’re interested here are a few of my favorite places. If you’re not interested, well whose blog is this, anyway?

You can love a place without liking its weather; this is the case with southern Louisiana, particularly the Acadia region. Baton Rouge is a nice college town, and nearby Mulate’s a famous Cajun restaurant that lives up to its billing. South of there is bayou country; one of the more interesting (and photogenic) excursions I took was a flat-bottom boat tour through the bayou, what the locals call a “swamp tour”. The bayous are loaded with alligators, some of them huge. Our guide said that if you want to take a swim in a bayou be sure to have a dog swimming with you since “Dem gator, dey really love dog.” and will eat the pooch instead of the dog. That’s the theory, anyway.

My wife and I really love the Southwest, including the Grand Canyon but our favorite is Bryce Canyon. Wonderful colors, fantastic stone formations and hiking trails leading to the bottom of the canyon, each trail rated for degree of difficulty. Even the moderately easy ones are a challenge since the canyon is 8000+ feet above sea level. It wasn’t fun hiking back up from the bottom; what was fun was standing at the trail head and watching others drag themselves that last 100 yards or so. Misery does indeed enjoy company.

Texas is….well, very large. So large that it’s further from East Texas to West Texas than it is from NY City to Chicago. This may not be of great significance, though, since so few people in East Texas have any interest in going to West Texas, which has beef cattle, some huge dairies, and a whole lot of nothing else. It’s so flat in West Texas that you can literally see the curvature of the earth, but once you see this it loses interest pretty quickly. The town of Hereford smells like it sounds. Someone once said that if they owned Hell and Texas they’d live in Hell and rent out Texas. Not sure if I’d go that far, and I’m sure there are some very pretty places in the state. But I’ve been there a number of times and am still waiting to see one.

As for foreign countries, Portugal is at or near the top of my list. Not a big country but big differences from the green of the north to the arid region in the Algarve to the south. Good food (especially if you like to eat fish for dinner that was swimming in the Atlantic Ocean that morning), fine people, and in the several times I’ve been there, never a bad experience. But bad experiences have been few and far between in any of my travels. As I said, I’m a lucky guy.

The other day I was looking through the table of contents in the current Journal of Environmental Quality and found this paper: “H+/phenanthrene Symporter and Aquaglyceroporin are Implicated in Phenanthrene Uptake by Wheat Straw”. The only term I could understand in the entire title was “wheat straw”! But exercises like this are therapeutic since it reminds me that I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

It’s important to know what you don’t know. One of my responsibilities as agronomist at Miner Institute was forestry operations, and it wasn’t a small undertaking since the Institute has some 8000 acres of forest. I was hampered by knowing virtually nothing about forestry. Corn and alfalfa, OK, but pine and oak–uh-uh. So I asked Ken Adams, an environmental science professor at Plattsburgh State University, who he’d recommend that we hire as a forestry consultant. Ken recommended Herb Boyce and his company, with the comment that Herb was a good “dirt forester”. As an agronomist anything relating to dirt sounded good, so we hired him.

Only weeks after we hired Herb Boyce, the Ice Storm of 1999 hit, decimating much of the Institute’s forest. A block of forest that was marked for selective cutting had to be re-marked and almost clear-cut since there were so few trees left undamaged. Herb conducted a thorough evaluation of our forest and drew up a long-term forest management play, and we were on our way. He predicted that within 15 years our forest would be in better condition than it was before the ice storm. It’s not been quite 15 years yet but long ago we realized that he was right; it’s amazing how fast a properly managed forest can recover from even the most devastating event. That’s the difference between someone with a college degree in forestry (which Herb has) and one who has the ability not only to determine what needs to be done but to work with contractors to ensure that the plan is carried out. Guess that’s what Ken meany by a “dirt forester”.

According to USDA, in 2011 64% of dairy farmers have a computer and almost all–61%–of them use it to access the Internet. This means that almost 40% of dairy farmers don’t use the internet, and why they don’t escapes me. A modest percentage are probably Amish farmers and others who for religious reasons aren’t “connected”, but what about the rest? Not surprisingly, operators of larger farms are much more likely to use the Internet–about 80% of farms with $250,000 or more in sales are on-line. But this still leaves 20% of ”commercial” dairy farms (I figure that $250,000 in sales is about a 60-cow farm) who don’t use the Internet. Wow.  Even more depressing, I don’t expect this number to get much smaller anytime soon, only declining as these stubborn fellows exit the dairy business. Let’s face it: If they’ve survived this long without being “connected”, they’re hard-core.

Someone once said that getting old isn’t for cowards. Not sure about getting old since I’m not nearly there yet, still this side of 70 (if barely), but getting older is not without its challenges. I was reminded of this the other day when phoning my wife from my hotel room. I needed to recharge the battery in my cell phone, and while on the phone with her wondered aloud where the heck it was. “Uhhh, aren’t you using it to talk to me?” At that point to save face I might have said that I was using the hotel phone, but those blasted cell phones list the number of the caller. She got a huge charge out of my faux pas, said “Wait until I tell everyone.” I said “Don’t you dare. “ No sooner did I get home, tired and hungry after an 8+ hour drive, when my son was on the phone (from no more than 30 feet away in the house adjoining our winter home), asking if I’d seen his phone. He then started laughing uproarioulsy, said that I had made his week. I told my wife not to tell anyone, but apparently she spread the word to the extent that if you hadn’t heard about it until this blog you might be in the minority. But I reacted with customary equanimity and good humor: I will get her for this.

Some wit, I think either Samuel Clemens or Will Rogers, said that the problem isn’t that people don’t know enough, but that they know so many things that just aren’t true. This certainly is a fact, and has been a thorn in my side for about as long as I’ve been working with farmers.

What called this to mind was the comment following the devastating floods, the result of Tropical Storm Irene, that plagued portions of New England. Flood waters in some cases completely submerged maturing corn, covering the plants with silt. One article from a “helpful” so-called expert noted that rain following the flood might delay farmers in getting back into these fields, but that the rain would wash much of the silt off the plants. And then again, maybe not: I had just returned from looking at some of these severely affected fields in New Hampshire, and the day before I arrived they had three inches of rain. Did the rain wash the silt off–even a reasonable portion of it? Nooo, the rain simply ran over the silt, leaving almost all of it right where it was before the rain.

This comment was obviously made by someone who had never had experience with corn plants affected by severe silt deposits. Not an unforgivable sin since few of us had ever seen plants that looked like this. But if you don’t know the answer, say so! Long ago I figured out that trying to b.s. a farmer may work in the short run but sooner or later you’ll get caught. Farming is a tough occupation, with weather, disease, bugs and other things that go bump in the night resulting in anb ever-changing array of problems and “situations”. Farmers respect a simple “I don’t know.” They respect this even more: “I don’t know, but I’ll try to find the answer.”  Especially if you do so!

About ten years ago a crop consultant darkened my door with some questions. I’d made fertilizer recommendations for one of our better dairy farmers. Some of these recommendations didn’t make any sense to him, but instead of telling the farmer that I was all wet, he told him that he didn’t understand the recommendations but would check with me. This made a hit with the farmer…and after we reviewed the farmer’s situation the consultant understood where I was heading with my recommendations.  Not that they were necessarily better than what he would have suggested, but in the end nobody’s nose got out of joint and we all moved on.

There are certainly more ways than one to skin the proverbial cat, and there’s room for reasonable–and reasoned–dissent among , for instance, fertilizer dealers, Extension educators and crop consultants. Farmers assume that fertilizer dealers want to sell as much fertilizer as possible, and while this may be their overall objective the better ones want to sell enough fertilizer to produce good yields while still keeping the farmer in business. (That thing about killing the golden goose.) I once had a fertilizer dealer come me with a serious complaint about the local state university’s fertilizer recommendations. He was really ticked off, claiming that the university was recommending too much phosphorus for the farmer! And he had a point, too.

A couple of tips I’ve found work well down on the farm: First, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If you think the farmer isn’t doing something quite right but the results seem OK and the farmer is happy with what he’s doing, focus on something else. You aren’t going to change everything (heaven forbid if you did!), so pick battles that you have some chance of winning and that will result in positive change.  And second, if a farmer asks a question and you don’t know the answer, don’t try to bluff your way through an answer. Farmers are all too used to these tactics, and while you might win in the short run you’ll lose in the long run. Say that you don’t know, get the answer (if possible) and then get back to him with it. Sounds simple, but this is done seldom enough that the farmer is usually very appreciative.

Someone once said that for farmers, next year will always be a better one. For farmers in the Northeast and down the East Coast, it wouldn’t take much to improve on 2011. The growing season started with unusually cold, wet weather that hamperedearly spring planting. Then it got wetter. Flooding along Lake Champlain wreaked havoc with traffic, all but cutting off some lakeside communities. I remember trying to get to a meeting in Middlebury, VT on May 3rd and being forced to take several detours on both sides of he lake because of roads closed by flooding. I decided to take the Grand Isle Ferry back to NY State but the lake was over the road leading to the ferry crossing and I drive through about 6″ of water to get there. It sure was good to be back on high grohad to und in NY State!  From there things went from bad to worse as what seemed to be daily rains continued, preventing timely harvest of hay crops–some of which were under water. By the time many of these fields were harvested they were far past “milk cow” quality. Yields, of course were in many cases tremendous because the crops were allowed to maximize yield (if not quality). This pleased farmers–until they saw those first forage analyses–yuck. A question I’ve asked and answered many times before: What’s worse than poor quality forage? A lot of it!

Mother said cheer up, things could get worse. So farmers cheered up and sure enough, things got worse. The unremitting rains of May and early June were followed by weeks of little precipitation. Crops that did get “mudded in” got stressed by dry conditions. Things finally settled down later in the summer and some nice weather looked like it might result in a decent–if late-maturing–corn crop. Then Tropical Storm Irene arrived, devastating farms in mountain valleys. In much of the Northeast where dairy farming been a way of life for generations, farms were located in valleys for easy access to rivers and streams. Soil quality was also better on the valley floors. These farms were the hardest hit by the 10″ or more of rain arriving with Irene, in some cases resulting in a complete loss of the corn crop. In September I visited a farm in New Hampshire that had land along the Connecticut River. The corn in the field was at least 8 feet tall, but the flood waters had reached 10 feet high, resulting in some areas in several ounces of silt per plant.  Crops are coming in as I write this, but 2011 will be a growing season to forget.

Summer may not officially end until September 22nd, but today is the end of Summer at Oak Point. Oak Point is a vacation community including about ten families that are here year-around—AKA “The Rounders”. Then there are the retired folks and idle rich (we are among the former but not the latter) who arrive in the spring and leave for warmer climates in the fall. That’s another half dozen families; of these we’re the first to arrive in late March and the last to leave in November. The rest of the approximately 50 families comprising the Oak Point community are summer residents, arriving sometime after school gets out in June and leaving in time to get their kids back into school. Some are here for a week or two, others for much of the summer. That’s why Labor Day weekend is a very big deal here, as cars get packed up and countless boats get pulled out of the St. Lawrence River for the season. This will be a very different community tomorrow than it was yesterday. A few of the “Rounders” celebrate the leaving of the summer residents, looking forward to peace and quiet, but I hate to see them go, and only partly because cool weather isn’t usually far behind them. September and October are often the most beautiful months of the year on “The River”; it’s too bad more folks can’t be here to enjoy them.

Speaking of weather, this has been a season to remember–or forget. In the 45 years I’ve been in Northern NY I can remember years with a wet spring, others with a dry summer, still others with a pile of rain just before (and during) corn harvest. But I’ve never seen a crop year like this one, which managed to combine all three problems. Fortunately, milk prices are high and look like they’ll remain high. They will have to if dairy farmers are going to be able to pay the prices feed grains are and will remain for the forseeable future. 

Earl Butz once said that if egg  prices get high enough “even the roosters will start laying them”, suggesting that high prices are the cure for high prices. However, I’m not sure this will be the case with high grain prices, simply because it’s not just one feed/food grain that has escalated in price. If farmers plant more acres of corn, it will have to come from somewhere because as Will Rogers said, they aren’t making land any more. That’s why the recent reports of record-high land rental prices in the Corn Belt should surprise nobody. One place some of the increased grain acreage came from in 2011 was alfalfa and other hay crops, so it’s not surprising that hay prices are very high. I can’t see any way around it: The cost of milk production has increased considerably and it won’t be coming down anytime soon.

Oh, dear. A University of Wisconsin study of farms in that state concluded that large (CAFO) dairy farms have better milk quality–lower somatic cell count –than do small dairy farms. This is unwelcome news for those who deplore “factory farming” and all it represents. Well, in the case of dairy farms it means quality milk. When I was in China working for the U.S. Grain Council the veterinarian who was my host said that he used to boil any milk he bought in the store. Having been on some Chinese dairy farms I could see why–the cows were milked by hand and the milk hauled to a central location some miles away for cooling. However, a farm we visited on the outskirts of Beijing had 800 cows, milking parlor and bulk tank and was running a somatic cell count of 70,000; my host used to drink that milk right out of the tank! Not that bigger is always better on Chinese dairies (or anywhere else); I saw one large government-run operation there that was simply deplorable by every measure. Of course you don’t have to go halfway around the world to find that–big farms poorly run, small farms run efficiently and well. But the Wisconsin study shows that on average, milk from large dairies is at least as good–and maybe better–than that from small farms. This information might be of interest to a certain male member of the British royal family who would like the U.S. to focus on organic farming and other ”holistic” farming practices. The Brits, in spite of a heavily subsidized agriculture, can no longer feed themselves and have to rely on imported foods; this is the model he wants us to follow? (We’ve gotta be more careful in who we let into this country, even just as a visitor.)

I recently saw a method of valuing standing corn to be harvested as silage. I’m always interested in this topic since it’s one of the questions from farmers that I dread getting–but almost every fall the question pops up again. This most recent method uses a formula based on the price of shelled corn, soybean meal and alfalfa hay to price standing corn harvested for silage. Based on the prices I could find (on July 1st)–pretty easy for corn and soymeal, not so easy for alfalfa hay–the formula based corn chopped for silage at about $90 per ton. Therefore a nice crop averaging 20 tons per acre would sell for $1800 per acre. Yeah, sure….the next time any dairy farmer in the Northeastern U.S. pays $1800 for an acre of corn will be the first time. With current corn grain prices, that’s equivalent to almost 300 bushels per acre!  

Dairy farmers are typically price takers, selling milk for what their milk coop will pay them, not what they think it’s worth or would like to get for it. Therefore they’re  in somewhat uncharted territory when they find themselves as price setters…and that’s about the time my phone rings. One reason I don’t like answering this question is because it’s so subjective, based not as much on what commodities are selling for but how much corn for silage is readily available in that particular area. Often we find that when one farmer has standing corn for sale it’s because he has an unusually big crop, in which case likely as not so do his neighbors. So it’s a buyer’s market, corn grain, soymeal and alfalfa hay prices be damned. 

The other reason is that many times one party is insulted by my best estimate of what the crop is worth; the seller is ticked if he thinks the price is too low, the buyer isn’t happy if he thinks the price is too high. If the buyer thinks the price is too high the seller is quick to inform him that the price wasn’t his idea, it’s all that Thomas guy’s fault.  On some occasions both are unhappy, which is when it’s time for the Crop Dude to take a bit of vacation.